Electrification turned over a new leaf in aviation by introducing new types of aerial vehicles along with new means of transportation. Addressing a plethora of use cases, drones are gaining attention in the industry and increasingly appear in the sky. Emerging concepts of flying taxi enable passengers to be transported over several tens of kilometers. Therefore, unmanned traffic management systems are under development to cope with the complexity of future airspace, thereby resulting in unprecedented communication needs. Moreover, the long-term increase in the number of commercial airplanes pushes the limits of voice-oriented communications, and future options such as single-pilot operations demand robust connectivity. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review and vision for enabling the connectivity applications of aerial vehicles utilizing current and future communication technologies. We begin by categorizing the connectivity use cases per aerial vehicle and analyzing their connectivity requirements. By reviewing more than 500 related studies, we aim for a comprehensive approach to cover wireless communication technologies, and provide an overview of recent findings from the literature toward the possibilities and challenges of employing the wireless communication standards. After analyzing the proposed network architectures, we list the open-source testbed platforms to facilitate future investigations by researchers. This study helped us observe that while numerous works focused on cellular technologies to enable connectivity for aerial platforms, a single wireless technology is not sufficient to meet the stringent connectivity demands of the aerial use cases, especially for the piloting operations. We identified the need of further investigations on multi-technology heterogeneous network architectures to enable robust and real-time connectivity in the sky. Future works should consider suitable technology combinations to develop unified aerial networks that can meet the diverse quality of service demands of the aerial use cases.

中文翻译：

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未来空中通信无线网络调查 (FACOM)


电气化通过引入新型飞行器和新的运输方式，为航空业翻开了新的一页。由于解决了大量的用例，无人机正在引起业界的关注，并越来越多地出现在天空中。飞行出租车的新兴概念使乘客能够运输数十公里。因此，无人交通管理系统正在开发中，以应对未来空域的复杂性，从而产生前所未有的通信需求。此外，商用飞机数量的长期增长突破了面向语音的通信的极限，单飞行员操作等未来选项需要强大的连接性。在这项调查中，我们提供了利用当前和未来通信技术实现飞行器连接应用的全面回顾和愿景。我们首先对每个飞行器的连接用例进行分类并分析其连接需求。通过回顾 500 多项相关研究，我们的目标是采用一种全面的方法来涵盖无线通信技术，并概述文献中关于采用无线通信标准的可能性和挑战的最新发现。在分析了所提出的网络架构之后，我们列出了开源测试平台，以方便研究人员未来的研究。这项研究帮助我们观察到，虽然许多工作都集中在蜂窝技术上，以实现空中平台的连接，但单一无线技术不足以满足空中用例的严格连接需求，特别是对于驾驶操作。 我们确定需要对多技术异构网络架构进行进一步研究，以实现空中稳健、实时的连接。未来的工作应考虑合适的技术组合来开发统一的空中网络，以满足空中用例的不同服务质量需求。